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The Kraus Project by Jonathan Franzen: review

If Jonathan Franzen was not almost universally heralded as the finest American novelist of his generation — The Corrections, Freedom, Strong Motion — some members of the American commentariat don’t believe his bizarre new book, The Kraus Project, would have ever seen the light of day. It’s an opinion that I share. Not that there aren’t literary riches to be mined in Franzen’s translation of two essays by the fin de siècle Viennese journalist and cultural critic Karl Kraus.

As editor of the influential journal Die Fackel, Kraus was required reading for the German-language chattering classes from the 1890s through to the 1930s, including Freud, Kafka, Brecht and the novelist Thomas Mann. And they likely did so to see who was targeted for Kraus’ bilious contempt. Kraus so delighted in savaging the cultural elites of his day that he was known as The Great Hater. But unless I have lost something in Franzen’s translation, how the Viennese managed to finish one of his literary diatribes is, well, beyond me. His prose style is opaque, at best, impenetrable if one was being, well, honest. Once he famously opined that if one his most notable enemies “understood one sentence of this essay, I’ll retract the entire thing.” That I would suggest would likely have not been necessary.

Because Kraus’s writing style is so dense and complex, Jonathan Franzen has annotated the test with lengthy footnotes to help explain Kraus to the reader and to elaborate on his own attraction to this now largely forgotten writer, and it is these lengthy disquisitions which make The Kraus Project an interesting, if difficult read.

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The book consists of two lengthy essays on a writer Kraus loathed, the German poet and journalist, Heinrich Heine, and one he championed, the Austrian playwright, Johann Nestroy. And it is Kraus’s takedown of Heine that perhaps best reveals the symbiotic relationship between Kraus and Franzen. Along with Goethe, Heine was the most famous German writer of the 19th century but his fame only fueled the Viennese critic’s chagrin. To Kraus, Heine was too Francophile, his prose too decorative — all form, no content — and for Kraus, Heine was way too Jewish.

One of the really absorbing sub-texts of The Kraus Project is the light it sheds on the complex role Jews played in German-language culture in the 19th century. Quite simply, they dominated the literary and journalistic life of Hapsburg Vienna. But one of the unfortunate by-products of their cultural “assimilation” was the anti-Semitism these culturally integrated Jews directed towards their less “sophisticated” brethren.

A Jewish convert to Catholicism, Kraus was not exactly an anti-Semite but he could be quite sniveling towards writers, like Heine, himself a convert to Christianity, who didn’t disguise their identity. As Franzen notes, “That so many Gentile German philistines are willing to forgive Heine’s Jewishness only adds to [Kraus’s] rage.”

But from Franzen’s perspective, Kraus’s real beef with Heine was his unparalleled literary success, a generation before Kraus came of age. For Kraus, Heine was the Lear-like father whom he envied and had to destroy. As Franzen explains, “Because Heine is the famous and widely beloved Kraus precursor, Kraus tries to annihilate him.” Franzen clearly identifies with this compulsion towards literary patricide because of his own complex feelings towards one of his literary models, the novelist Thomas Pynchon. Notes Franzen, “I’ll get over Pynchon somehow. Maybe through criticism, some discontinuity, some dialectic, that will enable me to forget him.”

Such drive-by shootings of cultural icons is only one of the many things bonding Kraus and Franzen. Another is their Luddite distaste for the mass modern media (of their respective eras) and the subjugation of culture by technology. At one point, Franzen derides the novelist Salman Rushdie for opening a Twitter account. Such little literary vendettas are among the reasons to give this strange complex book a look-see.

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